Wondering If Your Quote Is Too High? Ask These Questions Before You Send It.

Do You Second-Guess Every Price You Quote?

You send a proposal. Then the doubt starts.

Did I price that right? Is it too much? Should I have come in lower?

Plenty of owners in professional services go through this every time they quote. I had a client who did.

He used to work out his prices in his head. Every time, he’d second-guess himself and wonder whether he’d done the right thing.

Fixing it took two steps.

Learn what they are in the short video below or scroll down to read.

A pricing formula takes the guesswork out of the number

The first step was the number itself.

Together, we found a formula. He now uses a spreadsheet to arrive at a price that accounts for the different variables in each job.

What comes out is a number he feels good about. He isn’t making it up anymore. He has a systematic process he can apply to every proposal.

That took a lot of the doubt away. But not all of it.

A well-built price still leaves you guessing if you don’t know what the customer is working with

He sent a quote built on the formula. Then he was left wondering, “Is it too much?”

He was still submitting proposals without really understanding the customer’s situation. He was trying to hit a bullseye without knowing what the target looked like.

What changed that was getting better at BANT.

BANT means qualifying every sale for budget, authority, need and timing

BANT is an idea from sales. Before you send a proposal, you qualify the opportunity for four things:

• Budget: what they’re prepared to spend
• Authority: who makes the decision
• Need: the problem they want solved
• Timing: when they need it delivered

My client was good at qualifying for need. He asked enough questions to understand what the customer needed.

He was also good at understanding the right time to deliver.

But he never really qualified for budget or authority.

Authority means finding out who holds the pen

He was talking to someone who wanted the program to go ahead. That person wasn’t the one making the decision.

He was talking to the influencer, the person who could advocate for the program inside the organization. Someone else held the pen.

You won’t always get to meet the person with the pen. Many organizations set up their systems to work exactly that way.

What you can do is ask how the decision gets made, and what happens once they have your proposal. Then you’ll understand the internal process and how they’ll decide.

That lets you do a much better job of educating and supporting the person who’s lined up with you.

Your advocate wants this to go ahead. Now it has to go to the CFO, who’s sitting there grumpy, with a sharp pencil, wondering why it’s going to cost this much. What does your advocate need from you to answer that CFO?

Lots of people can say no. What you really want to find out is who can say yes, and how you can help them get to a better yes.

Everybody has a budget, even when they say they don’t

If you send a proposal without understanding how they’re thinking about budget, you’re throwing mud against the wall and hoping it sticks.

So ask. Create a conversation around budget.

Even a customer who says they have no budget has a number in mind. You can’t get the outcome you’re looking for until you understand the box they’re working inside.

What constraints are they already thinking about?

Ask these questions before you send your next proposal

• Tell me a bit about how this decision gets made.
• Once you get the proposal, what happens next?
• What is the person signing off on this going to be asking you?
• What material can I give you so you get the outcome you’re looking for?
• Do you have a budget in mind?
• What have you budgeted in the past for solutions like this?

Most of the doubt about your price lives in your own head

To his surprise, the customer accepted the quote.

That showed him where most of the doubt had been coming from. His own self-doubt and questioning had been causing him to underprice and undervalue his work.

He learned to get out of his own way and stop being his own worst critic when it came to proposals.

In the last while, he’s won some of his best and most lucrative proposals ever. He stopped second-guessing himself and underestimating his own value.

What would change in your business if you sent every proposal with that kind of confidence?

Want help building a pricing formula and better qualifying questions into the way you sell? Let’s talk.

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• Grow your business with bigger and better clients
• Overcome cash flow issues and improve your financial management
• Make better decisions and become more profitable

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The 5 Things Buyers Need to Know Before They Say Yes
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Why constant requests for a discount usually point to a message that doesn’t set you apart, and why I advise against discounting to win a sale.